Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.

The modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.

The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.

The room within is the great fact about the building.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

When anyone becomes an authority, that is the end of him as far as development is concerned.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy.

I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.

Less is more only when more is too much.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?

The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.

If it sells, it's art.

Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.

If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him.

Good taste is not a substitute for knowledge.

I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary.

I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches.

You can't make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

Nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

The baby boomers are out there, they've had a lot of good years of earnings, they've inherited wealth. They are buying trophy homes and will be for years. We are one of those places people dream of. They come here to buy a piece of that dream.

Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple...the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

It looked a lot worse than it was. Al is going to be released. He has vision and it's going to be day-by-day prognosis now. But it's much, much better than we initially anticipated.

We boast the highest standard of living when it's only the biggest.

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.

For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity.

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.

The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall.

Self fulfilling prophecies do exist in real life.

I don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.

Taste is a matter of ignorance. If you know what you are tasting, you don't have to taste.

Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part.

If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men and women have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men and women to capitalize their labor.

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be in America if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture -- if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. -- Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

What I like best about San Francisco is San Francisco.

Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm.

Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.

Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.

'Think in simples' as my old master used to say -- meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

Simplicity and Repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

The truth is more important than the facts.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

Form follows function -- that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Get the habit of analysis -- analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.